Marc Casals

University College Dublin (UCD)

Area of Research:

General Relativity

Research Interests

My research can be roughly divided into the following three areas:

(1) Self-force for Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals. The motion of a 'small', compact astrophysical object around a supermassive black hole deviates from geodesic motion due to the action of its own field - the self-force. I develop methods for the calculation of the self-force and the gravitational waveforms emitted during such inspiral. The main method I develop is the calculation of the self-force via the Green function of the wave equation for black hole perturbations.

(2) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Space-time. In the absence of a full theory of Quantum Gravity, one may gain a revealing insight into such a theory in the limit when the scales of the physical system are much larger than the Planck scales by quantizing the "matter" fields and treating the gravitational field classically. I investigate various quantum states of physical interest of the field in different curved space-times.

(3) Higher-dimensional Space-times. String theory suggests that our 4- dimensional world (the "brane") is embedded in a higher-dimensional spacetime (the "bulk") where the size of the extra dimensions may be as large as 1mm, leading to the thrilling prospect of creation of miniature, "brane" black holes in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Such black holes would emit Hawking radiation and would evaporate in only fractions of a second. I model the evaporation of rotating "brane" black holes.